Re: Internationalised/Localised postal code and country elements

Andrew Sullivan <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.provreg
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 04:11:24PM +0000, Gavin Brown wrote:
> > And what do you mean by "numeric"?  Remember that not all digits are
> > the ones familiar to those with a US keyboard.
> 
> I mean the range of code points from U+0030 to U+0039 inclusive.

That's what I figured.  The problem is, not everyone writes their
numbers that way, and many people who have these other ways to denote
the "same digits" think that they're equivalent.  In India, I have
observed signs with fairly free intermixing of what I think were
Devanagari digits and digits I recognized as mine.  Fun fact: using
Devanagari, this is a seven: ७.  Better, ५ is a five.  Six is ६.

I have been informed more than once that spreadsheets in the Arabic
world store Arabic-digit input as our familiar digits, and then
translate back at presentation time.  This is so that character
encoding can't mess up arithmetic operations. 

So, if someone is entering a localized version of an address and they
get to the post code field, are we confident that they're not going
to use localized digits, even if they use ASCII letters?

(None of this is to denigrate your suggestion, which I think is
reasonable.  I just want us to understand what rule we're making and
what the consequences will be, for whom.)

Best regards,

A


-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email protected]
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